JANET JACKSON

All For You [Virgin]

You know, I remember Janet when butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Or anwhere else. Then she went all Prince and suggestive on us around about 1999, and the bould girl’s been a right trollope ever since. Here she’s chatting up her engineer, Jimmy Jam, on the intro and singing about nice packages that she’d like to bite. Ulp!

All For You is fairly formulaic r‘n’b that occasionally rises above the current crop, especially on the orchestral ‘When We OOOO’ and the saucy ‘Would You Mind’ – “Would you mind undressing me?”

Early candidate for single is the Carly Simon sampling ‘Son Of A Gun’, but there’s really nothing here to compare with her ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ knock-off thang of a couple of years ago, and standard approach songs like ‘Truth’ lie uneasily alongside the more experimental treatments that occur elsewhere on the album.

In fact, by far the most interesting thing about this records is the

spoken word links between the tracks, sassy, sexy and sometimes very funny. Pity about the songs, then.

Stephen Robinson